DC:
My favorite subject, but it will have to wait. January storms, flooding and high winds a continual problem in Northeast. Power on and off. A real mess. Lots of snow in parts melting and re-freezing. Must be out of my mind living here. Rainfall already fifteen inches above normal for this year! Al Gore must be right.
Al Gore (a leftist now) is right. His Environmental philosophy/faith dictates that the earth is paying back you evil capitalists for your abuse.
The Rev. Ray Nagin, you might have heard, has also opined that the N.O. hurricane is because of the Iraq War.
All sorts of calamities caused by conservatives, you see. But it is good to see that we have found a way to get liberals to invoke the Diety, other than in vain.
Man, very well put. An extremely apt description. Isn't it odd that radical individualists seem to gravitate to totalitarianism, and yet accuse those of us on the right of being totalitarian? They preach universal inclusion, but on their terms. They advocate an open-minded approach to ideas, but as long as they don't include Judeo-Christian, Conservative ideas.
Stevin,
You are right on, my man. See ... recall that consistency is not required and all things are possible.
Thanks for dropping in.
For starters, DC, you've exposed the first causes in the development of leftism (not liberalism, which is nearly extinct)in post-modernism, and the roots of conservativism in metaphysics.
It occurs to me that post-modernism is the final disillusioning form of the materialism that lies at the center of liberal/progressivist/collectivist thinking. Postmodernism has the hip advantage of combining cynicism about the limits of material satisfaction with the futility of giving it up in search of something more. However you intellectualize it, it's simple anomie. Even the Beat Generation and the hippies assumed, in their bitter contempt for bourgeois society, that there was something more to life than Avocado-colored appliances even if they weren't sure what it was.
Post-modernism would have no respectability at all as a way of thought if it wasn't weaved into greater and greater complexities by the idle academic, political and journalistic classes. Nothing escapes the metastasizing cynicism of post-modernists, not art, architecture, comestibles, politics, history, dress, literature of all kinds, education at all levels...everything durable, mysterious, elevating and important swirls down into this intellectual toilet.
If it is sleazy, treasonous, hypocritical, totalitarian, politically correct, or some combination of the above, it is leftist scum and it should be killed.
Yes, that is a simplification but it holds true in about 95% of cases.
I got an A-1 Bullshit/Leftist detecting radar and as you suggested "I knows it when I sees it and I wants to kill it" 
But if you were explaining it to a child
"If it tries to steal your money to give to others it is a leftist"
"If it tries to tell you what to think and tries to control what you say and how you say it, it is leftist"
"If it decides something should happen based on anything other merit (such as race, sex, religion, colour etc) it is leftist"
"If it hates this country and the brave citizens who defend it, it is leftist"
and so on and so forth.
Should I ever have kids I will also explain to them that if they hit 8 years of age and are still entertaining leftist philosophies they'll be out the door.
Why 8? That was about the age I worked out that the Left was full of shit
Rhod and T,
What a twin bill. You both say it very well, in your own inimitable ways.
Rhod, you are very right about how it has infected everything and also how it is an intellectual toilet. It has everything to do with a personal selfish choice and nothing to do with genuine thought.
T, man ... that line about stealing your money and giving it to some one else. Very funny. As were the rest of your "I know 'em when I see 'ems". Know why? Good humor often contains a nice size kernel of truth.
8? You're getting liberal in your old age.
Great stuff. And a good conservative should love Australia, which I do, mate.
Update, My Mother-in-law is going home and to be perfectly honest I couldn't be happier, and have a new hero, My own wife, who in essense save her mother's life, with her experience as an RN, I am in awe.
Any way to the question what is a leftist.
The Judicial hearings can really put that into perspective. I would liken Judge Alito to Rocky, not the movie but the real Rocho Marchianno, they indeed put a golve on him but like the real Rocky, he took everything they had to give and then, as in the fight with Ezzard Charles, the seconds told Rocky he needed to knock Charles out now or he would bleed to death, his nose was ripped wide open, so he did.
Exactly what Judge Alito did.
But more telling was the witnesses who testafied in his(Alito) behalf the Leftists walked out of the hearing, they had not the stomach to hear anything positive about the man they were desparately trying to destroy because he did not believe in their perverted interpretation of the constitution and afterall he is a conservative. So hypocrisy reigns supreme.
So basically what is a leftist, a liar, a cheat and a thief.
Hillary is a perfect example of a meely-mouthed-gutless liberal, 45 years ago the Republicans passed civil rights legislation and the dems voted against it. We know this to be true, because LBJ said, he feared all he had done was to give the South to the Republicans, but again more telling, is just look at the democrat party, there are numerous blacks in the party but how many are allowed any real power in that party, ...Well lets name them Barak Obama, is one Congressmen Rangle and Conyers(These two have been in congress for a total of more than 50 years, yet do they head any committees... ?) are two more who have limited say in there party, but no real leadership that amounts to anything, so when does Equal rights come to the democrat party, the leftist do more to limit there rights than to enhance them but the blinders stay on and no one notices, yet they call the Republicans the party of the plantation. Hypocrites I think so.
Leftists' are the true party of the biggots, and the real haters, of the real hypocrites of this country.
So what is a leftist, one who wants everyone to have a free lunch, at everyone else's expense, but don't dare ask them to ante anything up up for it.
Hey Mark,
Great to see you back with the fire in the belly.
Really great to hear that about your mother-in-law and your wife. Good stuff.
Hey DC,
To many big words for me.
Leftist seem to be driven by feelings (they argue from the point of how they feel)
Conservatives are not based on emotion or feel good. But rather on interpretation of facts
Mark describes a group of animals at the second or third stage on the path to extinction. It isn't exactly the same as the mental process around death and dying, but close to it.
At the moment, they're mixing anger with denial and conceit. They're pissed off that it's happening at all, they're denying the realities behind the process, and they're claiming that they're too important for this to be happening to them.
All this began when liberalism expanded it's elemental passions for people to include liberalism itself, which meant that the importance of individuals was replaced by the importance of ideology. Reflexive arrogance and false pride kills everything it touches. Religions, fraternal organizations, parties and professions all whither away.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the death of liberalism corresponded to the petrification of the Democratic Party, and the subversion of the young by the corruption of our educational system. The same thing happens in all authoritarian systems, which is what the Democratic Party has become.
In it there's an orthodoxy which must be obeyed at all times, there's a list of secular Gods, there's a literature, a mass of intellectually slavish followers, a history which hides the corruption of the present and a gerontocracy running the show.
They can't arrest this process now. It's too late, but it will probably get worse.
Rhod,
You are right. And I think that things can virtually always get worse. I look for the cultural divide to widen and become so very obvious that we can all tell who is on what side.
As an aside, I think that Militant Islam with its heavenly rewards for the "unconstrained individual" who acts as judge, jury and executioner of those who adhere to the traditional view of mankind is a very natural partner for Leftists.
Michael, I agree to a point on feelings, but I think such a definition doesn't truly describe the differences. At our core, we all have a "faith" or ideology ... something that we put our anchors into to give us a philosophical base, so to speak.
The Leftists/post-modernists would argue this point, all the while saying with absolute certainty that we are wrong. Again, they are not required to be consistent. They are, by definition, inconsistent.
I argue that, although I can not scientifically verify the truth of my belief system at its core, still I can demonstrate that my value system works. And I can know as well as a human being can know, what is right.
On the other hand, Leftism fails and destroys everywhere it goes ... everywhere it is tried. If they had one success story in all of history to show otherwise, perhaps we could talk. Ah, but then we would have a different nature of reality, would we not?
As a caveat to your remarkably well-written explanation of the differences between leftists and conservatives, I offer this:
Another massive difference lies in the realm of personal accountability/responsibility. While the main tenets of leftism seem to revolve around the importance of the individual over everything else, it also (somewhat hypocritically) removes any and all semblance of accountability and responsibility from that individual for his or her actions. Whatever the individual does is always someone else's fault.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to take ownership of their actions, and thus accept the repercussions, positive or negative.
Again, as you say, these are remarkably blanket-ish statements, but they seem to hold relatively true.
DC:
If you can't scientifically verify the truth of your belief system, consider this. Neither can science prove scientifically that science is the only valid form of inquiry. If you can prove that your value system "works" by empirical evidence, it's closer to a lot of what science regards as "truth" or predictability.
The difficulty lies in convincing leftists of your conclusions, because the alternate reality imposed by leftism will automatically dismiss your conclusions as pointless and your morality as relative.
I like your comparison here, too. Militant Islam and Leftism share a gruesome kind of solipsism, with personal struggle (jihad) motivating the first, and a radical kind of subjectivism corrupting the second.
I think Michael's right, also. Leftism is consistently unable to test its realities and find them true, unless they reject your reality and substitute an elastic one of their own...one which already interlocks with their prejudices. I think they're driven more by physical sensations, a need for comfort and complacency. Agitate an earthworm with an electric current and it will react the same way.
I'm with Linoge, too. Personal responsibility is impossible or irrelevant in a world of complacent earthworms, because everything is water and soil and there's no valid aspiration higher than procreation and a puddle of rain water.
Yes, earthworms. Like Leftists, primitive and pretty predictable.
I like Linoge's comment a lot. He is arguably saying the same thing as I am, albeit a bit differently. As far as I am concerned, the whole concept of "personal responsibility" or "accountability" is, by definition, a completely foreign concept to a the "radically unconstrained individual" that is post-modern man.
The idea of accountability in itself requires one to think outside himself. This assumes a value beyond the individual. Leftist thought presumes no truth outside the radically unconstrained individual.
Wait till his nose hits my face. Theory ... meet truth.
Rhod, you are right about the limits of science. Modern secular scientists fail to grasp this point ... ironically, I think because they are really doing faith more than they are doing science.
All human observation and testing ultimately has limits (note my view of the "limited, but dignified man" here). When we reach the end of our observations, we all launch out onto some type of faith or philosophy to explain our world.
This is not to say at all that all such faiths are equal. I do believe in absolute truth. Yet, I can't shake a test tube and make any one a believer, either.
My head hurts. Where's Goomba?
DC:
Mine too. Maybe we should just call them what they are and be done with it. Yeah, where's Goomba?
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